Business owners should be competent enough to build their business, increase their sales, and run it effectively. However, without a proper plan in mind, adding the factor of market competition, business owners will lose a lot of sales and eventually go out of business. Listen to our guest in this episode, Mostafa Hosseini, as he gives you realizations on building your business through his insights. Mostafa shares the six simple steps in creating a one-page marketing plan for your success!
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Please welcome my next guest, Mostafa Hosseini. He has helped coaches and consultants implement their one-page marketing plan in less than three days. He works with coaches, consultants, experts who want to build a business that allows them to spend more time with their families. He does that by incorporating simple tools techniques, and empowers business owners to work on the business while constantly working towards to reduce his or her involvement in the time. Why does it work? Because he focuses on the business owner to create a simple one-page marketing plan that identifies the top drivers in the business that works. This allows you, the owner, to produce measurable results and establish a strong presence out in the marketplace, and clearly represents what your company represents.
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I am excited. I have a special treat for you. I know I say that every time but I mean it. I’m bringing you my badass friend. I’m bringing you the baddest of the baddest. This is one of the biggest challenges in your business that every time I hear a student talking about it, I’m like, “Learning to just bring them the juice.” I’m talking to Mostafa and you are the juice. Mostafa helps coaches and consultants create and implement a one-page marketing plan in three days. That is bananarama, which I’m so excited about. Welcome, Mostafa. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing your genius with us. Give us an overview. What’s your story? How did you get started?
Thanks for having me here. It’s great to be here. Thank you for the introduction. I have a long story but let me give you the shorter version. I started in a marketing agency back in 2010. We did full-service digital marketing for our clients, along with coaching consulting and helping our clients. Back in 2018, I was at a point where I was frustrated, and where my customers were making way more money than I was. I was helping them achieve that and my own marketing campaigns were not working.
I was also feeling frustrated because I was in a very hyper-competitive environment. People wake up one day and start a marketing company. I had competition all over the place. I was a bit frustrated. I read three books that changed the course of my life and business. The first one was Zero To One by Peter Thiel. He was one of the cofounders of PayPal. In that book, he says, “Competition is for losers.” At that time, I felt like a loser because there was just way too much competition. I didn’t have a clear way on how to stand out from the rest of the competition and differentiate myself.
That was one a-ha moment and my lights went off. Almost overnight, I dropped the digital marketing services. I took a month or two to try to figure out what am I going to do moving forward, then I read a couple of more books that took it to a whole new level. The first one was The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch and then Essentialism by Greg McKeown.
You have to be clear on your goals, stand out from the rest of the competition, and differentiate yourself.
I decided to drop everything and share everything with The One-Page Marketing Plan. There’s way too much going on and way too much noise. I’ve got my head in twelve different things and nothing seems to be working the way I want it. I decided to simplify, do 80/20 and stick to the essentials and the rest of it. Let me give you some personal stuff about my story. I’m married. I got two kids. My top three values are family business, growth and learning. I spend 99% of my time in family business and growth and learning. I love mountains. I’m an advanced skier. I love to spend time in nature, hiking, biking, barbecuing, and all that stuff. That’s me in a nutshell.
This is one of the areas that I’ve met people who everyone says they can do it, but not everybody can do it. What are you seeing as the top marketing challenges for business owners?
I already hinted to some of it, that is people poking around in too many different things, and nothing is working. We’re all attracted to this shiny object syndrome. We’re being pitched and people are bombarded with solutions, ideas and sales approach saying, “Come to us. This is going to work. They’re going to revolutionize here.” The number one challenge is people don’t have a goal, plan, and strategy to reach their goal. That’s the number one underlying problem.
I say that all the time. It’s so simple but still hard for people.
We’re like, “What are you trying to achieve?” “We want to grow our business.” “By how much?” “Lots and lots.” “How much are lots to you? Are they $100,000, $100 million, $1 billion?” There is a massive difference there. Those are some of the biggest problems. The biggest one is not having a clear vision of exactly what they want, the goal, and the plan to get there. Another problem is some people come up with plans, but the plans are usually a booklet or they’re too complicated and therefore, it’s collecting digital dust or sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
It’s not relevant to what we’re promoting or why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s like, “Why do you want a podcast? Why do you want another product?” I find my students are like, “Let me make another thing.” No. Let’s sell one thing. What do you think are some of the top myths about marketing and growth?
If I work hard at it, it will eventually work. That’s one of the first ones. I heard Tony Robbins years ago saying, “If you start running East looking for the sunset. Regardless of how hard you work, walk and run, you’re probably not going to see it.” If you’re working on the wrong thing, regardless of how hard we work, it’s not going to work.
I always like to say, math is money and money is fun. Nobody likes to do the math. To me, it’s fun but it’s not fun for some people. The same thing can be with a simple marketing formula. Is there such a thing? What is that because I don’t know if there’s such a thing?
The simple marketing formula is our One-Page Marketing Plan. That’s what we work on. What we do is we help coaches, consultants, authors, speakers and people who come through our training to simplify and consolidate everything that needs to do onto a one-page plan that they could use, implement, and see on a daily basis. I was using the analogy of flying. If we’re flying from Toronto to LA, how often on average do you want the plane to check if it’s on route or not? How often on average should we check? Probably every second.
My husband was a pilot, so I know being in the cockpit with him and going, “Are we okay?”
If you’re working on the wrong thing, it’s not going to work regardless of how hard we work.
There’s the system that the plane has and the pilot is checking. If it deviates from the route, it will check and come right back in. That’s exactly like checking on our goals, plan, strategy and action plan, “Are we going towards a goal? Are we implementing what we need to implement? Are we getting closer to where we need to go?” If we don’t have any goals, how are we going to achieve a goal if we don’t have it? If you try hard on achieving something that you know what it is, it’s almost impossible. What we do is people join us, we create that one-page plan, walk out and start implementing as we implement a plan.
In my head, I’m trying to wrap my mind around it. We know each other from another group. What does that process look like? I feel like we’ve got trailer board on top of trailer board about the things that we’re doing about the things. What’s that process look like? What are some specific actions that we can take?
We’ve got six steps into our One-Page Marketing Plan. Number one, what is the goal? What are we trying to achieve in terms of sales and numbers? How much revenue or sales are we trying to bring in and how many customers do I need to achieve that amount of sale? We’ve got a formula and a process to figure out, “Here’s how much sales I need. For example, I need 127 customers to get there.” That’s step number one. Figure out some of the numbers for marketing like, “What is my marketing budget? What is my education budget?” That’s another problem that people do or create for themselves. They don’t set a marketing budget.
When you ask me the marketing budget, I’m like, “I don’t know but I need 907 leads each month to hit my revenue goal. What should my marketing budget be?” That’s always my answer, “I don’t know but here’s how many leads I need. These are the qualified leads I need. I have to pay more for those leads.” You tell me if you’re the expert, but at least I have that number. I give you the intel to go, “Here’s what we need to do.”
We know how much we need to spend on marketing, and how much we need to spend on our education. If you take a funnel-building course and you’re missing some pieces when it comes to education, then it’s probably not going to work. People come in. If you don’t know how to convert, there’s going to be a problem. We need to educate and spend money on marketing at the same time. The next step is identifying a target market, “Who exactly are we trying to serve?” The problem around that is that people try to serve everybody and anybody that has a pulse. Trust me. You do not want everybody. If people cannot afford you, if people don’t have the right attitude, if you don’t like them, if they don’t like you, there could be a long list of reasons where you’re not a good match. You need to identify exactly who you serve.
I want my clients to be at clear yes or a clear no, “I love her. No, she scares me. No, I don’t like her,” or whatever because you save so much money trying to chase. I find people are chasing their fans versus marketing the students. That’s a different conversation. We have a lot of fans on our social media. They will never pay us. They’re just fans. They’re pushing the line.
If you need to think about whether you want to grow your business and you want to do marketing or not, if you want to think about it for 1 month or 2, 6 months or 1 year, I’m probably not the right person for you. I don’t have to convince you to grow your business.
We lose 30% of our customers every single year. If we’re not marketing, if we don’t have a marketing expert on our team, then you’re going out of business. That’s why you see people who’ve been in business for ten years and their sales are still flat and the database hasn’t grown. It’s like, “What are you doing?” “I don’t have a one-page marketing plan or any kind of marketing plan.” What I love about what you do is it’s a one-page. How long does a one-page take because it’s a program? It’s a one-page, but how long does it take to go through the program to create the one page?
It only takes three days. We create and implement it in three days. We walk out with massive clarity around the pieces. I gave you 2 steps out of 6. Do you want me to do the rest?
Yes. I love this topic. I hit my head up against a wall and spent the wrong money so when I find people that simplify it and give you specific action, I get excited.
Don’t try to be everything to your customers.
This is the 20% of marketing that does 80% of our results. For goals, what do we want? Who do we serve? The next thing is the offer. What exactly do we do for these people? What do we specialize in? The massive mistake that I personally made was I was trying to be everything to my customers, “I could do websites now. We can do SEO. We can do copywriting. Why don’t we just do everything for them?” That was a big problem. We became an ocean that was about an inch deep, then we switched to specialize in one thing. Now I specialize in one-page marketing plans. What is the offer? Why is it that you want to do that for your customers? That’s the next piece that we need to figure out.
By the time that we’re done with these two pieces, it’s like, “Here’s who I serve. Here is exactly what I do for them.” What I do for them is something that they wanted, they needed and they are looking for it. They would happily pay for it. When I show up and say, “I have this solution for this problem that you might be experiencing,” I don’t have to convince you to have a conversation. That’s the kind of approach that we want to take. That was step number three, to offer. Step numbers 4, 5 and 6 is, what do we do for lead generation? What do we do for lead conversion? What do we do for client retention? That completes our six steps.
When I look at a lead generator, I made this mistake. I set and forgot it. My marketing person said, “Go create a lead generator. I created something I thought was fancy.” Nobody even went through the whole thing because I gave him the buffet. A lead generator isn’t a buffet.
The question that we ask is, “What is one lead generation strategy that I’m going to work on in the next quarter or in the next six months to get it to work and have it bring me qualified leads while I’m sleeping?” The problem that I hinted at is people are working on twelve different things or even worse, they think about working on twelve different things. We think about, “There’s Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and phone calls.” Some people don’t even do it. They get it started and then they don’t do it.
Let’s do one thing well. You don’t need multiple platforms because no one’s going to see you. If you look at Facebook, you could post in the morning and it’s gone by the evening. Same thing with Instastory. They just disappear. I love what you said and I want you all to hear that qualified leads. That makes a huge difference versus leads because you wasted a ton of money on your database and software. You have to pay every time you send an email out to people that aren’t interested. You’ve got to get a clear yes or a clear no. Do you have some juicy stuff that you want to give to the audience? What can we support them with to help them with this process?
I’m going to share with you the template for our One-Page Marketing Plan. We’ve got a shared link where people could download. You could download and fill it out on your own, or if you care to join us and our community and you want to do it together, so you don’t feel lonely and you don’t just fill out half of it or you don’t get stuck, then we do it together. It’s simple and you could do it on your own. Download the template and start simplifying your stuff.
I want to ask you one juicy question before we go. When you look at your journey of being a business owner, what has been the biggest learning lesson? We have entrepreneurs who are starting, emerging and exploding. I want to know that, “If I knew then what I knew now.”
If there’s one thing I wish I knew twenty years ago, it would have been The 80/20 Principle. There are multiple examples. It’s 20% of your activities are responsible for 80% of your results or more. It could be 90/10 or 99/1. It’s not always 80/20. I’ll give you a few examples, 20% of your customers bring in 80% of your sales, 10% of your customers give you 90% of your headaches. Those are the two fire customers, or 10% of your sales team bring in 90% of your sales, or it could be 80/20. That is the principle.
In understanding that principle, what did you shift in your business and your life because that was the a-ha moment or the light bulb?
Back in 2018, I dropped my agency. I kept with coaching and training. That was 99% of our services gone overnight, and then we picked a market. We are like, “We’re going to stick with coaches and consultants. That’s it. There were a lot of people out there.” Here’s a fact. When you say you try to serve everybody, you end up serving nobody. When you say, “I serve female coaches between the ages of 35 to 55 who live in Canada and the US, or just in the state of California,” there are so many people that fit into that category that you literally don’t have the capacity to serve them all even if you want it. People think if they niche down, they’re losing it. They’re not losing it, they’re actually gaining and becoming clear and focused.
It’s such a massive market. We’re talking about 7, 8 or 9-figure business. There’s that fear of losing. They feel like they’re going to lose the whole world. My response with that is always, “You don’t have it, to begin with.” You might as well narrow it down and apply The 80/20 Principle, Essentialism, and the rest of it so that you can do it and run your business effectively. If I could read The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch back when I was going to school, or even when I was in high school, that would’ve made a massive difference.
It’s a game-changer for sure. Thank you so much. Thank you for your service. Thank you for serving us and contributing to us. I’m excited about your gift and the possibility of working with our tribe and our community. This is a gold mine right in front of us. I invite you to go check them out and see if he’s the right fit for you. We’re in business to support you in finding the right partners at the right time that offer the right solution to help you grow, monetize and explode. Mostafa, thank you so much. I appreciate you. Thank you for everything you do in the industry and for your time.
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me and for the opportunity to share the message. I look forward to serving and supporting your tribe in any way, shape or form that I can.
Mostafa Hosseini Helps Coaches and Consultants Create & Implement Their 1-Page Marketing Plan In 3 Days or Less.
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